The rest of the world has finally woken up to what we told it a week ago -- Qualcomm is preparing to lay off ten per cent of its staff.

This morning Reuter's hacks managed to stand up the story that chipmaker Qualcomm Inc is preparing to lay off several thousand employees, or more than 10 percent of its 30,000-strong workforce.

Qualcomm, which reported a 46 percent drop in second-quarter profit in April, is facing increasing competition from Taiwan's MediaTek Inc and a handful of small Chinese companies that specialize in making chips for low-priced phones.

Qualcomm is still saying nothing, but at least Reuters credited us with breaking the story. We said there would be 4,000 jobs, but it said 3,000.

Qualcomm forecast third-quarter revenue and profit below analysts' expectations in April, saying the loss of a key customer and delays in product launches by some smartphone makers will hurt sales of its flagship Snapdragon chips.

Longtime customer Samsung Electronics Co opted this year to use an internally developed processor for its new Galaxy S6 smartphone and Note rather than Snapdragon chips.

Qualcomm has also been under pressure from hedge fund Jana Partners to spin off its chip business from its highly profitable patent-licensing business.

The company, which installed nets around its buildings to stop staff dying when they tried to throw themselves off them, is expected to celebrate with a demonstration from its now expert trampoline teams.

Guo told his 2015 shareholders meeting that in addition being to the largest OEM for iPhones, Foxconn produces smartphones for Sony Mobile Communications, Nokia, BlackBerry as well as Xiaomi Technology, Huawei Device and Lenovo.

Foxconn has extended to Brazil and the Czech Republic and is soon to set up in India, Guo said. Foxconn continues to establish component supply chains to increase its advantage over competitors. We were not sure if he was talking about the world's largest zoo which is the Berlin Zoological Garden.

Shareholders were a little worried about Apple releasing OEM orders to other makers having a negative impact on Foxconn. Guo said that Foxconn had been working with Apple since the beginning and will continue to be its major OEM.

He said that competitors could not land orders from Apple simply by quoting lower OEM prices, Guo said.

Chipzilla might be the world leader for chips and squeezing the lift from AMD at the moment, but for some reason it decided to slash five percent of its workforce.

Intel has announced it will reduce its global workforce of 107,000 by about 5 percent this year as the chipmaker tries to save cash.

Apparently Intel is "struggling with falling personal-computer sales" and wants to shifts focus to faster-growing areas.

The announcement, equivalent to over 5,000 positions, comes a day after Intel posted a fourth-quarter earnings report that did little to dispel concerns about a slowing PC industry.

"This is part of aligning our human resources to meet business needs," spokesman Chris Kraeuter said.

The job reductions may include retirements, voluntary programs and other options, Kraeuter said, adding that Intel's typical annual attrition worldwide is about 4 percent so this is mostly going to be a non-hiring policy. But it is still a little surprising.

Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith alluded to a reduction in employment this year and said that Intel would increase investments in areas such as data centre technology, low-power chips and tablets.Chipzilla culled 10,000 staff as AMD duffed it up in 2006. Overall number of employees has grown since then and AMD is less of a threat.

Apple's favourite news agency, Reuters with its finger firmly on the pulse of reality, actually claims that Intel has been destroyed by Apple bringing in tablets killing off laptops. Given that laptop sales are growing while tablet sales are falling it is probably better that Reuters finds a reporter which does not write his Apple fantasies as real news stories,

Earlier this week, Intel said a newly built factory in Chandler, Arizona, originally slated as a $5 billion project that in late 2013 would start producing Intel's most advanced chips, would remain closed for the foreseeable future while other factories at the same site are upgraded.

Last September, Intel said it would close an old factory in Massachusetts, eliminating about 700 jobs.

Chipzilla, which happens to be Israel's largest employer and the recipient of shedloads of government cash, has been pressed to start treating its staff under the Holy Land Principles.

The Holy Land Principles are a corporate code of conduct for American companies doing business in Israel-Palestine which are based on the Mac Bride Principles that have proven so effective in Northern Ireland.

It is based on the concept that American companies, where ever they are based are supposed to practice fair employment to show the rest of the world how wonderful the land of the Free really is.

If Intel agrees then it will have to do something about allowing Israel's Arab citizens to be represented in its workplace. Arab citizens constitute 20 percent of the population in Israel, but make up less than 0.4 percent of the high-tech industry workforce.

However so far Intel has refused to sign the Holy Land Principles but also petitioned US the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to stop anyone mentioning it again. The SEC ruled in favour of the Holy Land Principles.

Apple stuck a Farrell in charge of Apple quality... what could possibly go wrong?

The Tame Apple Press is stunned after it was revealed that a Farrell has escaped from Apple custody after he had been put in charge of Apple's quality.

Ben Farrell (no relation) has just penned a bog where he exposes what it is really like to work for Jobs' Mob.

"I've just escaped the Apple institution. I've sent in my resignation, and fled down its bright white corridors curated by crass colourful pictures of iPhones past. I handed in my security pass and in return I was able to re-claim my creativity, individuality and free thinking from the secure Apple cloak room. For the first time in two years I feel light, creative and inspired," he wrote.He writes in the manner of someone who has just escaped from a religious cult – in fact he even uses the word collective "iCult machine whose dirty, worn-out, greasy and naive internal mechanisms of bullying, harassment and mind-games push out shiny and polished iPhones every year."

Farrell said it was ironic that one of the world's largest companies and one that prides itself on innovation, creativity and 'breaking the mould', operates on such soul-limiting, entrenched dogma. It's an organised boys club where perception is valued over substance and tenure over talent.

Two years a Slave

Farrell spent two years in the Apple camp managing customer service improvement for their technical support contact centres. Can you see what Apple did wrong here?

"Out of fifteen-plus years working in this industry I've never witnessed so many bizarre and unprofessional things, only some of which I have time to touch on here," he moaned.

Working in Apple was like a sheltered workshop with the common language spoken being "passive aggression, sarcasm and Kool-Aid-fuelled stories of 'success' designed to manipulate and intimidate naive workers who have never experienced corporate life outside the Apple walls."

Drink the Kool Aid

Chinese emperors believed the forbidden city in Beijing was the centre of the world and constructed their empire around it people at Apple feel the same. He said it was no coincidence that the new Apple campus looked like a giant spaceship. He wonders if the plan is for everyone to drink poisoned 'Kool-Aid' before ascending to the mothership.

Drinks with colleagues revolved around the same stories told again and again as drunken management told of times when Apple executives made 'strategic' decisions to cut jobs and shut down Apple sites so swiftly and carelessly.Stories have a notion of power and have an utter disrespect for the actions Apple has on the broader community of contractors, vendors, partners, resellers and business partners they have bent over a barrel of non-profitability.

Addicted to pointless meetings

Apple is addicted to meetings with 16 hours a day of the things.

"Meetings at Apple reeked of toxic agendas designed to deliberately trip people up, make fools of the less respected and call people out. Team spirit is non existent as 'internal customers' attack individuals and push agendas that satisfy their morning egos," Farrell wrote.

Apple actually rehearses its meetings in advance with "dry runs" to refine impressions and push agendas. How to bend, twist and polish data to tell the story you were instructed to tell rather than the reality the data presents. If a story can't be forged, the data is excluded.

In one case Farrell had to conduct a dry run rehearsale for a a fake menial meeting to satisfy management's ego.Sickness, family emergencies, and even weddings were given no respect at Apple. If you fall down stairs and injure yourself and have to go to hospital it is listed as a 'performance issue' on your record and brought up during a one-on-one with management as a major 'miss.'

"Even the morning of my wedding I was being harassed by phone and email to send a report someone had lost," Farrell said.

Yet after all this, simply raising concerns about management has got me nothing but retaliation from all involved, he said.

Nothing like the image

"I'm disheartened as I loved Apple. I loved their products and I've been an advocate for what it allegedly stands for. Unfortunately I've seen behind their glossy and polished stainless steel exterior, I've walked through their frosted glass doors and seen a toxic culture of manipulation, intimidation, threats and politics that are so incongruent to the values they preach."

Apple’s mantra that you “get what you pay for” does not apply to its own staff, who are paid lower wages than the rest of the IT industry, according to a leading consumer advocate.

Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has penned a letter to Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook to stop wasting its money on share buybacks and use the money to raise wages.

The five-time presidential candidate wrote in a letter published by the paper that poverty wages and harmful conditions are "a consequence of tolerating outrageous stock buybacks."

"'Designed by Apple in California' has a nicer ring to it than 'assembled by workers paid about a dollar per hour, working 11-hour shifts, and sleeping eight to a room in the Jabil Circuit corporate dormitories in Wuxi, China'," wrote Nader in the letter dated Oct. 23.

Apple declined to comment on Nader's letter, which echoes criticism from labour activists and right groups. Nader's slamming is the opposite of advice given by billionaire activist-investor Carl Icahn continues to urge the iPhone maker to buy back more shares using its $133 billion cash pile.

Apple is trying to buy its way out of the map fiasco by hiring Google experts. Jobs' Mob made a big thing of cancelling its map software on iOS 6 and forcing users to use its own “superior” system.

The only problem was that it was complete rubbish and could not even direct a fanboy to one of its own stores. In short, it should never have been released, let alone be made a marketing reason to buy the new iPhone5.

Now it seems that Apple has realised that it is not going to get away with running the shonky product for long and is desperate to make it go. Unfortunately the only place that such expertise exists is with its rival Google, which it famously fired.

Using recruiters, Apple is pursuing a strategy of luring away Google Maps employees who helped develop the search giant’s product on contract. It might just get away with it because most of them might want to accept due in part to the opportunity Apple represents to build new product, instead of just doing “tedious updates” on a largely complete platform. According to Techcrunch, when attention at Google turned to indoor mapping, things started to become less interesting and a lot of staff began looking around for other opportunities.

Google probably is not losing much sleep over it. The recent Apple Maps fiasco has shown that Apple is light years behind Google when it comes to mapping. It is only taking contractors, and Google has to get rid of them every year anyway.

The maker of jolly expensive printer ink, HP, is having a problem with fleeing staff. Autonomy founder Mike Lynch join a long line of top managers to leave the software maker since HP bought it last year.

Apparently HP CEO Meg Whitman has had the challenging task of going on a charm offensive. She has told Autonomy staff they have a bright future with HP.

The company bought Autonomy for more than $11 billion as part of a daft move by the then CEO Leo Apothiker to turn HP into SAP. However Autonomy did rather badly last quarter and was to blame for a disappointing performance of HP's software division.

Whitman said in an email that it was "always hard when a charismatic founder, who has built a great company leaves." But she added that Autonomy staff had a "very bright future" aft HP. She stressed that Lynch's departure was down to the division's poor performance rather than the notion that Autonomy had no place in HP's corporate culture.

Already one in five Automony people think that the the writing is on the wall and have cleaned out their desk and moved on to greener pastures. Lynch will be replaced by HP's chief strategy officer Bill Veghte.

World on the street is that perhaps things had not gone so well at integrating Automony and Lynch took the fall for it. HP had not done well with its software, not just around Autonomy but in other sides of its software suite as well.

The problem is that HP does things one way while Autonomy did them another. Interestingly enoguh, Autonomy never fell short on its sales targets until it was bought by HP.

An investigation by the US Federal Communications Commission’s has revealed that Google’s staff knew of WiFi snooping.

According to the report, the engineer who wrote the program told at least two other colleagues. While the Street View team members were unaware of this, one of the two is a senior manager in the company.

The program had the capability to collect data from unsecured networks. The report claims that the engineer" intended to collect, store and review payload data for possible use in other Google projects." The collection of data took place between 2008 and 2010 when Google was taking photos from its Street View car.

Google was fined $25,000 for obstructing FCC's investigation but it was not found guilty of breaking the law. The company said it wants to put the matter behind them.

One of the World's worst dates, Julian Assange has claimed that the FBI had tried to bribe the outfit's staff. Like many of Assange's comments he did not provide any evidence so we guess we will have to wait for a whistle-blower in the FBI to tell us what it did.

Assange threatened to break controversial super-injunctions if the details were leaked to him. He published details of “five or six” super-injunctions in the past. However, in a bizarre moment, he admitted that Wikileaks might resort to a super-injunction itself in order to protect its sources.

He accused the British public of an annoying middle-class squeamishness over the publication of secret cables and documents and would rather destroy a revolution rather than have something leaked . He insisted that he had seen no evidence that anyone had lost their lives as a result of Wikileaks disclosures, despite Government warnings that this would happen.

Opening up societies around the world may mean fatalities are a price worth paying, he said.